Part 39 (1/2)

”All of which is an unpleasant reflection on the enormous age I seem to have acquired in four years,” she cried. ”They must have been singularly long years to you!”

”With the exception of the last one,” said Paul, ”they were much the same as any other years to me.”

”Now, that's odd,” she remarked; ”because last year has seemed to go more quickly than any other year in my life. I wonder why it seemed so long to you?”

”It didn't,” he replied promptly. ”It was the other three that did that, because I spent them in learning wisdom.”

”And the last one in forgetting it? How you must have wasted the other three! Ah, there are the girls at last,” she added, springing to her feet. ”That means dejener, and I am as hungry as two wolves. You will stop of course?”

”More developments,” he murmured. ”You used to scorn such mundane matters as meals, in the days when the poets were food enough for you.

But please don't imagine for a moment that I am going to face that Anglo-French crowd out there; I would almost as soon listen to your opinion of Browning.”

”Do you mean to say,” she complained, ”that you expect me to minister to your wants in here? What will Miss Smithson say, what will the dear children say in their weekly letters home? You don't really mean it?”

”On the contrary,” he replied, placidly, ”I am going to take you out to lunch in the most improper restaurant this improper city can produce. So go and put on that Parisian hat of yours, and be as quick as you like about it. I am rather hungry, too.”

”You really seem to forget,” she said, ”that I am the respectable head of a high-cla.s.s seminary for--”

”I only wish you would allow me to forget it,” he interrupted. ”It is just because you have been occupying yourself for a whole year, and with the most lamentable success, in growing elderly and respectable, that I intend to give you this opportunity of being regenerated. May I ask what you are waiting for, now?”

”I am waiting for some of the conventional dogma you used to preach to me in the days when _I_ wanted to be improper,” she retorted. ”It would really save a great deal of trouble if our respective moral codes could be induced to coincide sometimes, wouldn't it?”

”It would save a great deal of trouble if you were to do as you are told, without talking quite so much about it. It is now half-past--”

”I tell you it is impossible,” she protested. ”You must have your dejener here, with unsophistication twenty-five strong--and Miss Smithson. What is the use of my having acquired a position of importance if I deliberately throw it away again by behaving like an improper schoolgirl?”

”What is the use of a position at all,” replied Paul, ”if it doesn't enable you to be improper when you choose? Don't you think we might consider the argument at an end? I am quite willing to concede to Miss Smithson, or to any other person in authority, that you have made all the objections necessary to the foolish possessor of a conscience, if you will only go and tell her that you do not intend to be in to lunch.”

”I have told her,” said Katharine inadvertently, and then laughed frankly at her own admission. ”I always spoil all my deceptions by being truthful again too soon,” she added plaintively.

”Women always spoil their vices by incompletion,” observed Paul. ”They have reduced virtue to an art, but there is a crudity about their vice that always gives them away sooner or later. That is why they are so easily found out; it is not because they are worse than men, but because they are better. They repent too soon, and your sins always find you out when you begin to repent.”

”That's perfectly true,” said Katharine, half jestingly. ”You would never have discovered that I was a prig if I had not become partly conscious of it first.”

”That,” said Paul deliberately, ”is a personal application of my remarks which I should never have dreamed of making myself; but, since you are good enough to allow it, I must say that the way you have bungled the only vice you possess is quite singular. If you had been a man no one would have detected your priggishness at all; at its worst it would have been called personality. It is the same with everything.

When a woman writes an improper book she funks the crisis, and gets called immoral for her pains; a man goes the whole hog, and we call it art.”

”According to that,” objected Katharine, ”it is impossible to tell whether a man is good or bad. In fact, the better he appears to be the worse he must be in reality; because it only means that he is cleverer at concealing it.”

”None of us are either good or bad,” replied Paul. ”It is all a question of brains. Goodness is only badness done well, and morality is mostly goodness done badly. I should like to know what I have said to make you smile?”

”It isn't what you have said,” laughed Katharine; ”it is the way you said it. There is something so familiar in the way you are inventing a whole new ethical system on the spur of the moment, and delivering it just as weightily as if you had been evolving it for a lifetime. Do go on; it has such an additional charm after one has had a holiday for more than a year!”

”When you have done being brilliant and realised the unimportance of being conscientious, perhaps you will kindly go and get ready,” said Paul severely. And she laughed again at nothing in particular, and raised no further objection to following what was distinctly her inclination.

When they had had dejener and were strolling through the Palais Royal, he alluded for the first time to their parting at Ivingdon more than a year ago. She gave a little start and reddened.

”Oh, don't let us talk about that; I am so ashamed of myself whenever I think of it,” she said hastily.

”I am sorry,” he replied with composure, ”because I particularly wish to talk about it just now. You must remember that, until I met Ted in town last week, I had no idea you were not married.”